2.05.2010

Kitchen Update, part I

When I last left off, my wonderful in-laws had come to visit in October and generously used their entire Seattle vacation time helping us move a wall to give us more space in the kitchen. Before I get to the more recent update though, let me provide everyone with the back-story to this whole kitchen remodel.

To borrow a phrase from the movie Clueless, our kitchen was sort of a Monet when we bought this house. The previous owners had done just enough to make the kitchen look good enough (except for the appliances) to attract potential buyers, but not enough to actually make the kitchen GOOD.

We dreamed and saved and clipped inspiration photos out of magazines, but we still weren’t really sure that we’d ever be able to afford a full kitchen remodel. I sure did get tired of hand-washing dishes though, and at some point we just decided to go for it. We started by hiring a plumber to replace all of our old galvanized plumbing (kind of important to have good water pressure if you’re going to have a dishwasher!), and while we were at it we had them install a gas line in the kitchen so we could convert to a gas stove eventually. The new water pressure was great, but we were still left with our cruddy old kitchen at this point.

Then about a year ago some new neighbors moved in next door to my dad and stepmom and they proceeded to completely gut their house. One day as I was driving to work I had a little flash of brilliance and I immediately called up my dad and put him to the task of asking his new neighbors what they were planning on doing with the kitchen cabinetry that they were in the process of removing. Several months of wondering later, and they gave us the cabinets. FOR FREE. Unbelievable! These cabinets are 10-ish years old, but are in wonderful shape. Solid maple with panel doors and really well constructed...and they were just going to go into a landfill! Man, am I glad my dad doesn’t have any qualms with pestering a complete stranger until he agrees to give us his unwanted cabinets!

So now it’s late summer 2009 and we have a bunch of cabinets sitting in a garage just east of Sacramento, and that means it’s planning time! My dad has been tinkering with measurements and plans for our kitchen since we got these bad boys, and things really got moving in January (It helps to reveal that you are pregnant and by golly that kitchen had better be done well before the baby comes, darn it! Amazing how that works to kick-start things!). We road-tripped down to Cali for Christmas and brought home a few of the upper cabinets, then my dad and Karl installed them a few weeks later. After months of storing our dishes in various parts of the house, it was so nice to move them into the new (to us) cabinets!

You’d never know it by looking at these cabinets, but my dad did a TON of work to them to make them fit into our space. The upper cabinet to the left of the fridge was originally part of a bank of three cabinets, so it had to be cut apart and re-assembled. Then the cabinet above the fridge required a few hours of on-site work (by my dad and Karl) to cut it down, file and re-assemble it to make it fit in the smaller-than-expected space. Now it all fits like a glove and it looks like it was just meant for this space!